


It's a Heartache

by AnnetheCatDetective



Series: Give Me The News [5]
Category: St. Elsewhere
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, a baby is present, post episode: Newheart, so you know... that's what you're in for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 18:50:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17065193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Victor knows he's not cut out for this, but he's not going to have any peace of mind if he doesn't try.





	It's a Heartache

    Victor shifts and looks at the buzzer a long moment. He came here for a reason. He can’t just leave. He brought food! Well, he could take it home and eat it, sure, but he can’t use the other stuff he’d brought, and…

 

    _The dread he couldn’t shake from the first syllable on and it just sat heavier and heavier on his gut he had just been touching had thought it was a stranger, it’s always a stranger, it’s supposed to be a stranger, and her baby was, what, four months, five, and she wasn’t a stranger and he’d held touched ohh no, without thinking at all that a stranger could also have a baby would still have died but he had been so excited, it was ghoulish, so excited when it had been a stranger dead and when it meant he could assist, and then the guilt was--_

 

    And anyway, Phil had said Jack Morrison was looking for him, but they’d missed each other at the hospital, and then Victor had been… he’d been exhausted getting out of surgery, but he’d also been sick to his stomach and his nerves were just wired, so he’d done what he always does when he gets home exhausted and unable to relax. And, well, he’d cleaned and re-organized everything in the place when they had been _waiting_ , when he wasn’t sure if they would even be able to do the surgery and when he’d been afraid Craig would pick Kiley over him and he had just needed to do something before he shook right out of his skin, so he cooked until he was ready to pass out, got a couple hours before a stress nightmare had him out of bed, cleaned the kitchen and slept again. Not so out of the ordinary, as of late.

 

    So now he’s got his own food for the next few days taken care of, prepared meals stashed in his fridge and freezer, and then he’s got these, and Jack was looking for him, and Jack…

 

    _When did he know and when did he know about this and what could he have said to him if they had found each other? When he’d retched over the biowaste bin outside of the OR and nothing came up on him really but the sick feeling wouldn’t leave, and they should have found each other then he was easy to find but they didn’t and he’d have done anything he was asked in that moment if it would mean he wouldn’t feel so bad but what could he do when he had already taken away given away when he’d already assisted and it had been in his hands and there was no taking back what another doctor hadn’t done..._

 

    He carefully gets both tupperware containers tucked in one arm so that he can buzz to be let in, heads up to the right apartment with the tupperware containers and the big paper bag and knocks, his stomach a cold, tight ball.

 

    “Ehrlich…” Morrison opens the door and blinks at him. “What, what did you need, is it work?”

 

    “What? No-- No, of course not, I-- Look. I know I’m not the best when it comes to tact. And I know there’s nothing I can say that-- that would be very comforting. And I thought that if I tried, I’d probably mess it all up. So I just brought food and I’m going to keep my big mouth shut!” He holds the tupperware containers out. “There’s a fruit salad, and a pasta salad. No olives!”

 

    Morrison’s breath hitches a little and he nods, stepping back from the doorway and nodding Victor in. His apartment… well, it looks a little like a whirlwind hit it when compared to the Victor Ehrlich standard, but compared to the way Fiscus had lived, there’s-- ugh, there’s no comparison with Wayne Fiscus. It’s a nice place. Not perfectly organized, no, but it looks pretty child-proofed, and any lapse in cleanliness is more than understandable. He’d kind of like to just offer to clean and organize it all himself, except he doesn’t want to ruin Morrison’s system or accidentally un-childproof anything, and also they’re work friends-- he thinks they _are_ friends!-- but they aren’t close, aren’t the kind of close where it wouldn’t be weird to jump in and offer to do all that. Sometimes they’re on a first name basis again, after the… the whole incident. Sometimes they’re not, he guesses today they’re not, and that’s okay, but it just makes it weird if he offers too much. Doesn’t it?

 

    “I appreciate it.”

 

    “And Chandler said you were looking for me, but by the time he told me, I couldn’t find you and I heard you were supposed to be home… and I was--” _And I was holding your wife’s heart in my hands and massaging it back to life in another woman’s chest and they read out her name and I felt just sick but I went to find you and you were gone_. “I thought I should bring food over. I almost made pasta primavera, except it would need to be heated back up. Oh, I should have, though, that’s more comforting, I should have made something hot…”

 

    “I wouldn’t have heated it up.” He shrugs, taking the tupperware to put in the fridge. “I’ll get you your containers back at work once I’ve washed them, thanks.”

 

    “You can bring them back dirty. Oh! And-- I just-- I bought formula, because I guess-- I mean, you can’t feed a baby pasta salad, and I didn’t know if you needed-- and while I was doing that, I bought diapers, just in case. Just in case with everything, so you wouldn’t run out of anything, with the baby.”

 

    There’s something, a spark of something more than the dull emptiness of grief, behind Morrison’s eyes for a moment. Victor’s never been good at reading those things. He isn’t really comfortable with the way the moment stretches out and the fact that they’re still looking each other dead in the eye and there are feelings he can’t decipher going on but if he was enough of a moron to ask what the man was feeling, of course it would be ‘well what do you think’, he must feel awful, he must feel heartbroken, _Victor was holding her heart in his hands in his hands, he didn’t know_ he must feel something beyond just sad and lonely in a way Victor hopes he never has to know and fears he’d never be in a place where it would be a danger. He’s never had something like what the Morrisons had, he’s never had something to lose, and _her heart was in his hands_ maybe he never will, because they were so _hers and he didn’t know it was hers_ happy… not everyone gets that. Having it and losing it must be worse than never having it at all.

 

    It’s gratitude, maybe, for the food and the baby stuff, but it doesn’t feel like that’s it, either.

 

    “You didn’t have to do this. Thank you.”

 

    “Well I…” _Gave your wife’s heart away and I thought it belonged to a biker or something, always imagine organ donations coming from bikers pulled out of grisly wrecks, strangers, not someone I met at parties saw her baby know her husband, Porter General knew we needed a heart when they got her and if they didn’t know we needed a heart would they have managed to save her, even brain dead they could have held onto her long enough to say goodbye if they hadn’t known we needed her heart and all I cared about was getting to stick it in our own patient never would have thought to ask where it came from_. “It’s just what people do, I mean, bringing stuff, and-- Food, I mean. And Chandler said you wanted me but we didn’t--”

 

    “Mm, yeah, I-- I forgot what I needed to ask you.”

 

    “Well I know Chandler was going to look in on your patient, so… I hope it was that you needed someone to run an errand or, or you needed pasta salad, because I mean--”

 

    There’s something that’s almost a smile, that flickers across his face and then dies in the most hideous verge-of-tears kind of a way.

 

    “I don’t think that was it, but… thanks.”

 

    “If you remember what you need me for, you can call me. Any time. At the hospital, or at home-- I’m usually not real busy outside of work. And I could get someone to cover for me if it was for you.”

 

    Morrison nods, though before he can say anything about what it might have been, the baby starts crying, and Victor follows him into the other room, stands by feeling helpless and out of place as Morrison picks up his baby, gently bouncing him and cooing to him until the tears stop. How does an infant process grief? One day the person who spent the most time taking care of you is just gone and she never comes back, what is that like? You don’t know what death is, hell, every time you can’t see someone they stop being real, but you start to trust that one or two people always come back and exist again and look out for you when you need something. How do you deal with it when one of them doesn’t?

 

    Maybe it makes it harder to deal with the times you can’t see your other parent, maybe there’s a fear of the day he doesn’t come back now, or maybe it’s just like she was never… never quite real, and he’ll never remember her anyway, not when he’s older, he’ll only know her through photographs and stories. But…

 

    _But would you care if you hadn’t been the one assisting when they gave someone else his mother’s heart, would you think about a stranger’s life when a stranger could have had a baby? Are you a good person, Victor Ehrlich, for saving your own patient, or are you a bad one, for not caring where the new heart came from?_

 

    Patients have to be like puzzles, not people. That’s just part of being a surgeon. It doesn’t mean not caring, but if you were up to your wrists in somebody and you can’t stop thinking about who they are as a person, you’re not doing your best job. You’re distracted, you’re sloppy. They can’t be people again until they’re stitched back up and their vitals are steady and you can turn the switch in how you look at them, and he’s a good surgeon, and he likes people and he cares about them, but he knows when not to look at them as people he likes. Even so, even the patients he speaks to beforehand and has a rapport with, they’re still strangers, whose families he doesn’t know. This is why Craig doesn’t want him developing too much bedside manner, maybe. Afraid he won’t be able to turn it off in the OR. But he’s good at that, or he usually is. He mostly is. He always was, until the moment he knew which family the heart he’d held in his hands had torn apart.

 

    His thoughts are starting to get more orderly, but she still breaks into them, the guilt still gnaws at him. And… _and there’s her baby, in her husband’s arms, and they’ll never get her back, and maybe you weren’t the doctor who didn’t try hard enough to save her, but you were still the one waiting for her to die, you did_ know _that a heart for a heart transplant comes from a dead human being._

 

    “He’s getting big. Well… I guess the last time I saw him he was...” Victor holds his hands up, at a pretty good approximation of Peter Morrison’s size at birth.

 

    “Yeah. Yeah, he’s right on track… he’s, uh, he’s doing good.”

 

    “Well, I should, I should go. But I meant it, about calling me. For anything! I do windows.”

 

    He laughs. There’s something teary still lurking behind it, but it’s a laugh. “You do windows?”

 

    “Sure, I do everything. It’s how I unwind. When I can’t surf.” He shrugs.

 

    “Ehrlich-- Victor. Thanks. Really.”

 

    “Oh, don’t thank me, I just-- It’s what people do, I thought.” He takes a step closer, casts a questioning look to Jack first, before awkwardly patting his shoulder, and giving the baby’s cheek a little touch. “I’ll see you, I guess.”

 

    “You’ll see us.”

 

    He ducks down a little to smile at Peter, and even with how awkward he feels, how miserable the mood, he breaks into a grin at the way he’s waved at, the little baby giggle when he reaches out again to gently chuck under his chin. “Okay, I’ll see you around, too, then, champ. I, uh, I’ll let myself out. But-- Right, but you can call, if you need something. I’ll be… You can call any time.”

 

    “Sure, about those windows.”

 

    “About anything.” Victor hesitates at the door. “I mean… that’s what friends are for, right? And that’s-- and we’re-- So, right, about those windows.”

 

    “Thanks, Victor.” Jack smiles, and he kisses the back of little Peter’s head, guiding one hand to wave goodbye with a little more finesse than the earlier excited infant-clumsy gesticulating. “Say bye-bye, honey.”

 

    Peter doesn’t manage ‘bye-bye’ exactly, but he smiles and he babbles and he’s so _cute_ , and Victor never thought about kids beyond something that would happen someday, but okay, so he can get why people like them. He can get the appeal. If he ever manages to make the whole marriage thing happen, maybe he can see himself being more enthused about those two point five kiddos than just the fact that they’re the normal, expected thing, and that someday he’d be able to afford them.

 

    And he’s not a monster _except for that part where you were waiting for a stranger to die and you were so excited for it to happen, better someone else’s patient than yours, right?_ he waves back and says ‘bye-bye’ in the appropriate sort of sing-song that people use with babies.


End file.
